I can get used to this.

Well, turns out Mom didn’t sleep at all.  That’s not unusual.  Holly said she didn’t finish watching stuff on the DVD until like 2:00, and then she had to be up at 5:00 to get ready for her train, so she just stayed up.  I woke up long enough to give her a couple hugs sometime before 6:00 when she left and then went back to bed.

I woke up to Holly fussing at me at 10:30 because another girl was due to come look at the room at 11:00, so today started off with a fight.  Blah.  She wanted me to get ready because what if she showed up early and yada yada yada….and then the girl didn’t show up until 11:35.  A completely unnecessary fight that could have been avoided if she would just treat me like an adult and her equal.  But that’s obviously going to take time, if it happens at all.

But hey, we got a roommate!  She seems really nice and we even met her parents who were here, too.  The hilarious part is that the mom is pretty much the black version of my mom and the dad is from Bertie County, NC, like half an hour from where my grandmother grew up.  I think it’s meant to be, haha.

Then we watched Troy and then I took a nap.  I think the craziness of this week has caught up to me because I am absolutely beat today.  But our plans for tonight were 100% worth getting up for.

Tonight was the first time this city felt normal and not scary.  Two of the regulars from the restaurant where Holy used to work, as in the one she just left last week, are up here on business, so they took us out tonight.  They are the sweetest married couple, Chad and Frank.  They took us to this super nice hotel for a drink before dinner, and I got this beautiful panoramic shot of the view.  Then they took us to a Peruvian restaurant for dinner and I got to try all sorts of cool new stuff, like cow heart which is actually delicious and sauce made from bread, and insisted on buying us a couple more drinks, one was made from a Peruvian liqueur and I wasn’t crazy about it but didn’t hate it.

The important part is that I felt like I belonged here tonight.  We joked and laughed for hours, and we even have “inside jokes” now that we’re leaving each other Facebook comments about.  Frank and I really hit it off and had each other laughing the whole night; Holly said that she thinks that’s the most she’s ever seen Frank talk, apparently he’s usually really quiet.  They even had their driver take us all the way back to our apartment so we didn’t have to deal with the subway (I didn’t even mention how badly my legs were hurting from all the walking we did earlier from the subway to the hotel lounge to the restaurant).

When we got back it was like 10:30 and Holly and I sat at the bar/restaurant next door and talked to the very sweet and very attractive bartender.  We’re definitely going to be there quite a bit.  It’s a great little place.

Like I said, this is the first day that I felt like I really lived here and wasn’t just on vacation, and it was only solidified by what happened at the end of the night.  I came back to the apartment first after we left the place next door because Holly was smoking, and when she came in she told me that a girl she met on the stairs told her there was rooftop access and then took her up there and the view was so incredible that she had to come back down and get me.  The five flights of stairs were so worth it because the view is INSANE.  I have to go back up there tomorrow and get a panoramic shot of the view in the daytime.  It’s insane.  We can see EVERYTHING.  Including a perfect shot of the Empire State Building to our right.

I think it really hit both of us when we were up there tonight:  This is really real.  We live in New York City.  We live here.  This is our dream, and it’s in front of us right now.

#livin

#wow

#nobigdeal

(Yeah, hashtags are part of the jokes from tonight.  :D)